The governments mismanagement of user fees as the source of revenue is not the fault of user fees, its the fault of the idiocy that is the DHS.

As Pistole would say - SEE!!!! TSA is WORKING!!!! Give me more, give me more....saying we haven't had an attack in 10 years has got to be the most ludicrous argument to get rid of or otherwise limit the reach of TSA as we know it.

So do I - and your point is? Still looking for the answer to a couple of very simple questions -

Where do we draw the line regarding what is enough security. What is the benefit attributable to "saving" a human life.

The argument of cost/benefit or cost/effectiveness keeps coming up so its a relevant question. You did it yourself right here - "sustainable and reasonable cost." How many deaths avoided is necessary to make the 8 billion investment in aviation security reasonable? By the way - deaths avoided is a useful metric - the other way to state it is in terms of LYS or in the case of UK NHS, QALYs. Take your pick. You want to play with cost-effectiveness arguments, you might want to understand them first.

And finally, if one can maintain the same level of security (save the same amount of lives for example) while reducing the burden on that subset of documented low risk travelers, then what is that in terms of benefit?

You again miss the whole point. PreCheck's $85 is a user fee to a club whose admission criteria the government will not reveal.

Imagine if Disney World had a program where you could skip to the front of every line for the right price, but where payment alone was not sufficient to ensure such access. No one at Disney will reveal what exactly makes one eligible. You pay up and find out a few weeks later whether you've been accepted. And if you're denied, you don't get your money back.

That's your PreCheck user fee. What do you fail to comprehend?

It is absolutely the point. Math is a tool, not an end. Crunch numbers all you like. If your input data are flawed and/or you misunderstand the significance of the results, you've (at best) wasted your time.

Check out this article: http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/f.../1/v35n4-4.pdf. It makes the point about significance quite well.

You need to work on your stats before asking others to do it for you. And the argument by analogy provides logically unsound and invalid conclusions despite their emotional appeal. ;)

There is nothing "squishy rhetoric" about mocking proclaimed "test results" and associated "test validation" for something that hasn't even been demonstrated to
make a statistically significant improvement in passenger security and can't be done anytime soon. The PreCheck for a fee decreasing in-plane passengers' security/safety risk is an emotional article of faith rather than anything statistically proven that would make it by the review boards of any major scientific journals.

Security screening for WEIs at airports works for deterrence and object interdiction in a way that it can't work to reliably detect terrorists. This is an environment where profiling results in very high "false positive" frequencies while "true positives" are more mythical than "false negatives". of cost? This is another version of TSA SPOT in action, this time for $85 per person.

Ignoring the concept of statistical significance and the cost-(in)effectiveness doesn't help you make your case.

In your first example, it doesn't matter. There is no way that a real terrorist is going to be stopped by the TSA clerks from bringing anything they want through the checkpoint. Real terrorists figure out how to do whatever it is they want to do. Getting something past a TSA checkpoint isn't a particularly heavy lift.

Given that you stipulated that one is a terrorist, either it is somebody who has a weapon in a side pouch and is going through the NOS, or it is a GE member planning to pick up weapons from a TSA clerk on the other side.

In your second example, I am absolutely certain that none of the passengers are terrorists. And the number of passengers can be as big as you want to make it. 100, 1 million, 100 million, whatever you like.

None of the statistical predictors you want to use to predict that someone is a terrorist actually predict anything. The incidence of terrorist attacks is too rare to be susceptible to statistical analysis. What has to be done is, an actual planned terrorist attack has to be discovered and the perpetrators intercepted. Thus, there is no justification for classifying persons of the "wrong" skin color or the "wrong" religion as Untermenschen and harassing them.

Seems you don't have much of an objective fact based rejoinder. As for the "squishy rhetoric," assertions of "unsound" and "invalid" need just a bit more depth of analysis or they are nothing more than whining.

If you dont want to discuss this from a perspective of evidence then fine for you. As for journal reviewers - I'm really curious, have you ever published a real data paper and have you ever been a reviewer? I certainly couldn't tell based on your posts that you've had that experience and usually I'm pretty good at that.

If a reviewer ever wrote "the conclusions are unsound and invalid" in his review and that were the end of it, as the editor, I'd never ask him to do a review again.

The government is making a national security argument about revealing TSA checkpoint tactics and could very well do so with the proposed precheck for all program.

I do know that in the case of GE - if you are denied, you can and do get, if you want, from the ombudsmans office the reason why you are denied and you do have a right of appeal. Since the new all comer precheck is not yet been detailed, one can only go by what the current process is and guess it wont be much different. The CDP does list disqualification criteria in a general sense and it relates to violations of law or CBP regulation. Less than 1 in 20 is denied. Certainly not a perfect system but the upside is - you can opt out of participating.

The fee is not to be precheck - the fee is for them to process your application. What do you fail to comprehend?

Then we dont need TSA at all. We dont need precheck, we dont need application fees, and we all fly when we want where we want with 2-liter cokes and C4 explosives if we want.

I agree with that much of your statement, at least reworded to "we might not need TSA at all."

My basic educational-stats prof stated that measuring people's head sizes to arrive at their IQ can be incredibly reliable; however, that doesn't make it valid. I could grasp this but my earlier reference to validity vs. reliability was too unsophisticated for your mathematically-trained mind to process. The debate here seems to be about the trees but we're overlooking the forest. Enough figurative language - to wit...

Since you proclaim yourself to be, as I am, a fan of user fees, at least in certain situations, it surprises me that you accept the premise of the TSA's existence as a "given."

Since you proclaim yourself to be, as I myself tend to be, opposed to "redistributionism," it surprises me that you accept the redistribution of a portion of your income to the maintenance and expansion of a new, bloated, and still-growing bureaucracy, whose most visible manifestation to us average taxpayers comprises the unionized, badged and blue-shirted "officers" into whose hands - literally at times as our Vice-President would put it - we place ourselves at the airport.

In other words, IMHO the debate would better be whether a less centralized, re-privatized form of security, overseen as appropriate by the federal government, might provide more effective and efficient - more valid - security than that currently in existence.

The $85 fee on top of all of the other exemptions is one small symbol that invites that discussion IMHO.

YMMV.

That topic has been endlessly debated in countless threads. The topic of this thread is the proposed $85 fee for Pre-check, not the existence of the TSA.

That may be closer to the truth than some think.

Pre 9/11 screening only failed by not limiting some items. The non-terrorist history since 9/11 demonstrates that terrorist attacks are somewhat rare. So rare that 1.6 million people have traveled by air 365 days each year for 12 years without an event.

Again, IMHO the $85 fee that leads to the exemption of travelers apart from those fitted into the previous exempted groups, leads to that much more important debate. YMMV

Right. In case you didn't realize this, 2-liter Cokes aren't dangerous. And nobody wants to fly with C4 explosives. In the exceedingly rare case in which someone does want to use C4 explosives to blow up a plane, no amount of screening is going to stop them; what's going to stop them is paying attention to evidence of plots and intercepting them.

If there were an actual threat of terrorism, eliminating screening would make air travel safer than it is now. As it is now, the slovenly inefficiency of the TSA clerks concentrates passengers at the checkpoint, creating a large, vulnerable target. Anybody that wanted could come up with a couple of AK's and spray the checkpoint queue.

I agree. It's all theatre and has no value. Lets see how many posters agree.

Eliminate all TSA screening at tha airport. In or out.

Carl, sounds like boogie agrees. TSA screening at the airport has no value.

GU, in or out.